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 Daniel Brookshier's BlogJuly 2005 ArchivesNew: 3D Math, Viet Nam eLearning, Vocabulary & Open Grade Book in Global Education & Learning CommunityPosted by turbogeek on July 15, 2005 at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)This week we have three great projects from three different parts of the world. Here is this week's crop of great ideas from three countries.
o nb-elearning - eLearning Portal Services for Viet Nam
These are some great projects from language to math to helping students and teachers. Since these are new projects in our community, if you find these interesting, email the owners and volunteer to help. We are a community and lending a helping hand makes us a stronger community. Here are a few more details on each of these projects and the email addresses of the owners:
nb-elearning - eLearning Services in Viet Nam
This project is used to developing Elearning services in Viet Nam. This project is just starting, but if you are Vietnamese or can help out, please join this project.
Open Grade Book - Web-Based Grade Book for Teachers
The goal of this project is to create an non-intrusive open source gradebook built for teachers, but accessible by parents and students. The application uses Tapestry as its front-end, Spring and Hibernate for the back-end. Any database that Hibernate supports should work but MySQL is used for development
Dictionary - Learning a vocabulary of an specified idiom
There is a prototype application based on Java ServerFaces technology. The application is used for learning a vocabulary of an specified idiom, like english or spanish. Although the application is a multi dictionary in many languages, the original intention is to be a usefull tool to learn vocabulary.
VICS3D - Interactive Visualizer of Curves and Discrete 3D Surfaces (Portuguese Interface)
Another application from our members in Brazil. Drawing surfaces and curves in three dimensions is not easy but it is a key tool for students are learning Calculus, Geometry and Algebra. The objective of this project is to create a modeller of curves and surfaces with a simple interface that allows the students to draw, manipulate, and to modify curves and surfaces in the two or three-dimensional space. The surfaces and curves would are drawn in the systems of cartesian, cylindrical and spherical coordinates. The orientation of the systems of coordinate and viewpoint can be modified in real time through controls in the visualizer. The current version already has quite a few options. The interface is in Portuguese. but we can only hope they get a multi-language interface soon. Here is a picture of what they have so far:
Swing Set 3 - The Rotary Bazooka T-Shirt launcherPosted by turbogeek on July 02, 2005 at 02:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)Tossing a t-shirt is not as easy as it looks. Especially if you are a software developer. That is at least what the Swing Set 3 team tells me. Looking at the flesh wounds of one of the members, it is a bit dicy (or rather the launcher bytes). The Swing Set 3 team only garnered second place this year. I was quite surprised. The winning entry was closer to the Bluetooth of Danish Viking and King, Harald Blåtand, not the Bluetooth related to Java ME device (BTW Java ME is the new branding for J2ME). Swing Set 3 on the other hand was a marvel of electronics, old bycycle parts, and sharp pointy bits that together flung t-shirts to the back of the auditorium. Ok, here is the team: o Matt Quail (http://madbean.com) - The software guy and master of the GUI interface
o Brendan Humphreys (http://opencurly.com) - Aluminum expert, T-Shirt Artisan
Just a bunch of software guys trying to hardware, the same way they do software. That means bugs and crashes, right? But let's look at the technology now because it is quite impressive.
Features
o Secondary low-volume/high-range t-shirt release boom - This one sent a t-shirt to the back of the room.
o Mac 15 inch 1.5gHz PowerBook - Command and control center I love their visual interface. But as you can see by their photos, they really should stand a bit farther back from the imager.
Based on the speed, the software calculates the best time to release. That's the theory anyway and the hardest part. Time for physics. A 200 gram t-shirt, spinning at 200 RPM, at a radius of 80 centimeters has an effective weight of 10 kilos. So forty kilos of t-shirt! That is a lot of shirt. The latches have to hold the 10 kilos and still be able to open in milliseconds or the trajectory will be wrong. Now for the real problem. Inadequate code coverage unit testing in a real environment. The highly precise infrared sensor set to 850 nanometers are key to making the device wok. In fact testing in the auditorium was done to be double sure. Unfortunately these super accurate sensors were susceptible to broad spectrum source (like a reporter's camera flash). The end result was that the system did not have an accurate idea of where all the spinning bits were and let fly whenever a reporter's camera went off. Another manifestation of Murphy's law and perhaps one to remember. If you have a very accurate measurement tool, the world will throw noise at you that looks like clean and accurate data. Beyond the 28 hours a day that each member contributed to the effort to chuck a shirt, they also work for Cenqua. Cenqua has two tools; Clover and FishEye. Clover is a code coverage tool for Java (a great product but lousy for t-shirt launch testing). it tells you what parts of you code are not being tested by your unit tests. FishEye is a tool that provides a web based interface into your source code repository, allowing sophisticated searching, RSS feeds and much more. http://www.cenqua.com/ The build pictures are here http://flickr.com/photos/pte/tags/tshc | |
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